Friday, May 30, 2014

Grassroots push leads to negotiated minimum wage hike in Michigan

The dust has cleared on a brouhaha surrounding a proposed minimum wage
hike in Michigan.

The good guys (mostly) won – thanks to grassroots organizing, massive public
pressure and some skilled negotiating behind closed doors. It was an incomplete
victory, but it was a victory all the same – most low-wage workers in Michigan are
getting a 25 percent pay increase over the next four years to $9.25.

The story starts at Raise Michigan, a grassroots organization that
put together a petition drive in February to put a proposal before the
legislature to amend the minimum wage to raise the wage. If the legislature
didn’t pass it, it would go before voters in November.It’s a similar gambit that anti-choice
organizations used to circumvent Gov. Rick Snyder’s veto of legislation that
excluded abortion coverage from Michigan’s health insurance exchange last
summer.

The idea was to raise the wage for most workers from $7.40 to $10.10 an
hour over three years from, 2015 to 2017, and then index future increases to
inflation. As importantly, the petition would also raise the minimum of tipped
workers from the current unconscionable $2.65 an hour by 85 cents a year
until it reached parity with the rest of the work force.

Of course, the usual suspects in business and the restaurant industry
cried bloody murder about how giving low wage workers a raise to non-poverty
income levels would wreck the economy. But the legislature’s Republican majority was
in a pickle – if they defeated the measure in the ledge, then it would go on
the ballot – where minimum wage increases tend to fare quite well.

In response, Senate majority leader Randy Richardville (the dude who
drove me to blog in the first place) reasoned that if the minimum wage law was
repealed, then technically an initiative amending the law would be out of
order.

Follow me below the fold for how that particular evil gambit actually
turned into a productive set of negotiations and a legislative victory.

Richardville proposed a bill
that would raise the minimum wage to $8.15 an hour (and the tipped wage to
$2.93) on Sept. 1, 2014. The bill included no future increases and no indexing
to inflation.Needless to say, few
people were happy.However, even
Richardville’s bill was a small step forward – theoretically, he could have
raised the wage by 5 cents an hour (or even eliminated the minimum wage). Or he
could have paired the increase with a take back in another part of the law –
like conservative house member Margaret O’Brien, who wanted the increase to
only cover workers who were 21 years old and older (extending the existing
ability of employers to pay a lower wage to teenagers). Ballotpedia has links to and descriptions of all of the bills.

However, two things happened.
Most importantly, the folks at Raise Michigan raised a stink, and got a lot of
media coverage (some detailed by Eclectablog), while they, labor groups
and other progressive organizations managed to flood representatives with mail.

That in turn gave Sen. Minority leader
Gretchen Whitmer some leverage – something she isn’t used to having much of
with a 12-person caucus in a 38-member chamber.She used it to extract three more wage increases out of Richardville in
2016, 2017, and 2018, as well as some inflation protection.

With a few more twists and turns in the House, the final bill
ended up with increases in the wage from $7.40 to $9.25 by 2017. After that,
the wage will increase up to 3.5 percent every year to keep up with inflation, as determined by a five-year running average
(as long as unemployment isn’t over 10 percent – which was one condition
Republicans demanded).

One major flaw of the bill is that it doesn’t close the gap between the
tipped and standard minimum wage, but they make a (very) slight bit of progress
(from 35.8 to 38 percent of the standard minimum) and get the same percentage
raises from 2015 on.

So what’s progressive activism worth? For a fast-food employee working
25 hours a week in Michigan, it’s worth about $2,300 a year by 2018; for a food
server working the same, it’s more than $1,080. For many people, that’s the
difference-maker for paying the rent and keeping the lights on. It’s not what I
wanted, but considering that Democrats, let alone progressives, control no part
of government in Michigan, I’ll take it –for now.

But in case you needed in more motivation to get out the vote in the fall, imagine how much better the compromise could have been in Democrats had had control of even one chamber of the state legislature or the governor's chair.

So why not chip in a bit to Democrat Mark Schauer's campaign for governor?

(H/t to Eclectablog for providing detailed coverage and commentary throughout the minimum mage battle).